Tomorrowland’s Problem Isn’t Tomorrow, It’s Yesterday

Beginning last week, visitors to Disneyland had access to a new attraction: a 15-minute extended preview of the movie Tomorrowland, which comes out in May. It’s in the old Captain EO space (for you Disney aficionados), and the preview uses some of the effects that have come to be called “4D,” like rumbling seats and air blowing in your face. Director Brad Bird is rightly beloved for animation like Iron Giant and Ratatouille as well as the live-action Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and there’s no question that the movie looks like it’ll be lots of fun. But the new footage—and a behind-the-scenes exhibit next door—also point to the movie’s reliance on a troubling strain of futurism.

The preview begins with a young boy toting a heavy bag to the Hall of Invention at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. He makes his way past the early-Mad Men-era wonders (people movers! The original It’s a Small World Ride!) and in fact the whole thing looks a lot like Tomorrowland—the actual place in Disneyland. That’s no accident; Walt Disney designed a bunch of attractions at that World’s Fair.

Our boy trudges up to the front of the line in a best-invention contest, but he’s about to have a problem, because his judge is Hugh Laurie—the acerbic Dr. House for some of you, the dimwitted Bertie Wooster for the PBS crowd. In the bag, it turns out, is a jetpack.

Yup, the symbol of the future that never happened. As we see in cross cuts, the jetpack does indeed jet, but as the kid says, it doesn’t exactly fly. In fact, it scrapes him laterally across a cornfield. But a little girl with a posh British accent and a tea party dress—she introduces herself as Athena—takes an interest. They ask the kid why he built it, and he says “I guess I got tired of waiting for someone else to do it for me.” Essentially, he did it because it was cool, and to inspire people.

Since the jetpack doesn’t actually work, Laurie shuts him down. But Athena follows the boy, John Francis Walker, out to a bench in the Fair. She gives him a lapel pin with a T logo on it and tells him to follow her and Laurie as they lead a group onto It’s a Small World.

John gets a seat on a boat by himself and enters into the familiar ride (song: still stuck in my head), but then a laser scans his pin, a barrier comes up across the watercourse, and the bottom drops out from beneath John. The boat sluices down a Pirates-of-the-Carribean-like (ride, not movie) drop and eventually floats to a metal room that looks like a square subway car.

John goes in, of course. A woman’s voice warns passengers to put on a hard hat—they’re hanging on nearby hooks—but John can’t reach. Metal shutters slam closed. Some kind of hyperspace-looking discontinuity happens and knocks him around. Then the doors re-open.

Oooh. In a fog-shrouded world, John sees Athena and Laurie in a sleek, fish-like airship, flying away. He chases after them, still carrying his bag of jetpack, but reaches a ledge. Suddenly! (You knew there was a suddenly coming.) Massive assembler robots appear out of the fog, extruding spiraling buildings beneath them. John falls, lands on another catwalk, and the jetpack falls near him, breaking into pieces. Suddenly again! Another robot—a big-eyed, friendly Disney one, not a Japanese violent one—grabs the jetpack and expertly puts it back together with tool-tipped fingers, giving John a mechanical thumbs up.

Then John falls again, knocked down by more robots. In freefall, he grabs ahold of the jetpack, and sees through a break in the clouds that he’s high above a miraculous city of golden spires, airships, and monorails.

Still falling, though.

Now, look, this is actually a lot more suspenseful in the preview than I’m making it sound to you, because you’ve already realized that the kid is falling while holding onto a jetpack that at one time did not work, but now a robot has fixed it for him. So John manages to strap on the pack and hit ignition just before crashing to the ground. He zooms into the skies of Tomorrowland.

Excitement!

Then more of a trailer comes. John apparently grows up to be George Clooney, which is a good deal, who as an adult goes by the name Frank Walker. (Do you like that nominative determinism? Our hero walks the walk frankly, OK? If his parents had named him Valtar Von Bloody, this would be a totally different movie.) In the present, something is going wrong in Tomorrowland, a utopian city full of science fiction stuff built covertly when the world’s smartest people assembled at world’s fairs. Only a young girl who Frank knows can save the city; she’s Tomorrowland’s hero. Hugh Laurie is some kind of adversarial character, and OK. We’re off to the races. Like I said, it looks fun.

In an exhibit of concept art and props across from the theater, voices—Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof, I think—talk about the concepts they were working from. World’s Fairs used to depict a bright, shiny version of the future. What happened to that? They ask wistfully. Wouldn’t it be great if the geniuses who brought us that vision—you know, like Walt Disney—had actually succeded somewhere in another dimension? And we could get there? And have jetpacks?

(An aside for my fellow theme-park nerds: The light fixtures in the exhibit recapitulate the “T” insignia on the pins, the logo for the movie. That’s some lovely, imagineer-level thinking.)

But…let me break out the problematizer for a moment. That World’s Fair vision of the future, born out of pre-World War II science fiction and post-war optimism, had plenty of issues. It was at its heart an ugly sort of futurism. I love the iconography and significance of the 1939 World’s Fair as much as the next nerd, but aesthetically and philosophically its origins were a little too aligned with fascism for anyone to accept unquestioningly—rejection of the past, idolatry of speed, technology, and war, as Edward Denison writes.

Put aside for a moment that everyone in charge of this vision was basically a hyperrational white dude, which introduced all sorts of exclusionary problems. The fact is, the people who ran the World’s Fairs actually succeeded at everything they were touting.

Like what? Well, transnational corporations built “conveniences” for everyone like televisions, telephones, robots, and interstate highways, and then kept finding new ways to market them to a diminishing middle class. The problem with world’s fairs isn’t that the vision of the future they sold didn’t come true; the problem is that it did.

For a while, the aesthetic fell out of favor. Tomorrowland in Disneyland used to be all white curves and squared-off typefaces. By the 1990s that was starting to look dated. In 1991 Disney execs rejiggered the concept. Tomorrowland in Florida would be rethunk—science fiction would replace reality. Here’s a great piece on that. In Los Angeles, the park reskinned Tomorrowland, somewhat ironically and halfheartedly, gesturing toward a steampunkish, Jules Verne aesthetic. It never really worked, and what’s left of it still looks out of place in the park. Tomorrowland now seems very today-ish, especially since all the visitors bustling through it are carrying tiny black rectangles of glass with the power of a supercomputer. And now that the white walls and square typefaces have been out of fashion for a while, it’s their turn to be a futurism once again born of nostalgia.

In science fiction right now you’ll see a philosophical schism between, to be really simplistic about it, optimists and pessimists. The optimists want science fiction to pitch big ideas, to get back to hardy engineers solving the shit out of intractable problems, sometimes with ray guns. I’m going to slightly unfairly tar the great writer Neal Stephenson as an exponent (not to mention, obviously, Bird and Lindelof and their co-writer Jeff Jensen), and at it’s worst it’s an ideology that extrudes abominations like the right-wing-inflected takeover of the Hugo Awards. The romance of the thinking is hard to argue with, for sure. Let’s take a semiballistic monorail to a space elevator so we can get to our asteroid colonies and start mining, already! Plus maybe some nanotechnology for plentiful food and perfect medicine for everyone.

The pessimists, though, see things differently. They have nothing against building utopias…but they notice that we aren’t doing it. They notice that the people who are selling utopias are burning all the carbon-containing fuel on the planet at the same time. Again, tarring someone slightly unfairly, I’d pitch Paolo Bacigalupi as a leader here, and Margaret Atwood, too. They agree that science fiction’s job is to get big ideas in front of people, to operate as a workshop for the future. They just want to point out that we’re drinking all the fresh water and making it possible for horrible diseases to get footholds they never could before, while turning over the control of global food supplies to a few companies at the exact moment we’re looking at a planetary population of 9 billion people.

Listen, the fight for the future—both real and fictional—doesn’t have to be a trade-off. It’s not Tomorrowland versus Snowpiercer, Star Trek versus Blade Runner. The reality is likely to be some wonderful, horrible combination of all those visions. William Gibson famously said that the future was already here, just unevenly distributed. We at WIRED took that to heart 20 years ago and aimed to try to root out the futuristic parts, give them a polish, and show them off. But now it seems clear that the unevenly distributed futures don’t all look like San Francisco or Tokyo. They look like Lagos, too. Or Damascus. Or Makeni.

So be suspicious—just a little—when a multibillion dollar company promises you a nostalgic-futuristic utopia. Because all they want is for you to sit back and buy it. That doesn’t mean Tomorrowland won’t be good. Enjoy it for the hopeful idealism it touts and the imagery, which is sure to be gorgeous. And gosh Clooney and Laurie are dreamy. Maybe Tomorrowland’s secret-society city with jetpacks for mass transit is your goal. But remember: To get the future you want, you’re going to have to fight the one you already have.

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